Tipton man: MI5 held gun to my head

Three British men released from Guantanamo Bay last week have accused MI5 officers of trying to force them into making false confessions - including using a handgun held to their heads during an interrogation.

The men, the so-called Tipton Three, also revealed that they narrowly survived a massacre at the hands of Northern Alliance forces after they were captured in the northern Afghanistan city of Kunduz.

The three, Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed, all from the West Midlands town of Tipton, arrived back in the UK on Tuesday after spending 26 months as suspected Islamic terrorists in the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

They denied fighting for either the Taliban or al-Qa'ida and insisted they had gone into Afghanistan in October 2001 to take aid to Afghani villagers. Instead, they became swept up in the war against the Taliban, and were captured by the Alliance when Kunduz fell. They were nearly suffocated when Alliance forces herded them with thousands of other prisoners into shipping containers.

The three men allege that British diplomats failed to intervene when US forces arrested the men at the jail. Instead, MI5 and Foreign Office officials interrogated them at the US base in Kandahar.